Sunday, October 3, 2021

Zachary Alameri: Week 4 Serial Sliced Sculpture

 








Concept:

For this project I wanted to recreate landscape that I used to spend hours on. As a kid living in the early 2000s there wasn't as much technology as we are used to, and my favorite thing to do was go outside with the other neighborhood kids and play on an open field. The field was a flat plane in-between a hill and a creek going up to another hill. That's what it was in reality, but to a kid like me, it was the ultimate battle ground. The greatest playground to imagine and be whatever I wanted it to be. With this in mind I recreated the landscape with inspiration from battles in Lord of the Rings and structure of a whimsical imaginative world. 




Techniques:

I made my model in Rhino 7. I started by using the polyline tool to create the perimeter of the area I would build on. I then used the planarSrf command to create a solid plane to morph. In order to morph the plane in the manner I wanted to, I combined the rebuild command with the points on command to extrude the plane and create irregular and interesting landscape. Once I achieved a plane I was satisfied with I used the extrudesrf tool in order to get a sold 3D model of my plane. While I had a nice landscape, the bottom of my sculpture was too uniform for my liking. In order to fix this issue, I created irregular shapes with the curvedline tool on a flat plane and extruded them through width of my object. I then Boolean difference the irregular shape from the landscape and got the whimsical look I was going for. To help the bottom seem more irregular, I extruded 4 points at the bottom to give it more of a rounded bottom to sit on. I wanted to also represent my cosmetic enchantments and to do this I used the Drape tool to create a surface that would go over the sculpture. Trees and rocks are created by rebuilding 3D objects to create irregular and random geometry.  





Materials:
For my Keyshot renderings I wanted the object to have really good lighting and to cast hard shadows since it is a landscape. I set the lighting to Sun and sky and set the location to Dallas, Texas and Time to an evening in July. The time and day ended up being a big factor to extracting the exact lighting I would be going for. As for model the paper mache surface is painted a mix of brown and green to better represent the difference between the layer and the box. I also went to the web to grab a texture map of soil to give the land more natural looks and irregularity. As for the rocks I made two of them similar in material, giving them scratches and the same color. The material is a rough plastic with rock texture laid out. The last rock is made of a different color however contains the same materials and scratches as the other two. The log in the middle was made with hard plastic as well, however I went into the material graph and found a preset wood texture to lay on top of the model to give it more characteristic. The tree trunk itself was made with a flat material to mimic the cardboard that was used for the tree in the real sculpture. As for the leaves I was able to find a texture for leaves online and applied the image over the bump. It ended up being too big so I had to resize the image to create more print and giving the illusion of a full tree. The background is an evening sunset setting to help portray the lighting.

As for the post processing part of the project, I assembled my serial sliced sculpture and laid a layer of paper mache over the top and said containing holes from the dowels. I researched  various methods of creating paper mache and I used flour and water because it created lumps and a texture that would help give the land some character and volume. With the leftover cardboard I created the trunk for the tree and pasted painted cotton balls on the top to represent leaves and fluffiness. The rocks and log on the middle are clay molds I made and painted myself. The cosmetic features help represent the transition from reality to imagination.  









No comments:

Post a Comment